Such admiration was to be expected. Keats is, no less than Spenser, a poet's poet. poet's poet. He presents scenes which a poet will interpret, even as he will interpret nature itself. His writings are, as it were, a rich treasure-house of poetic material. But for us there is at least this danger-that if we search for the root of this luxuriant Basil plant "in perfumed leaflets spread," we may find something not unlike that mouldering head amid the damp soil watered by Isabella's tears.

I mean that our enjoyment of the poems of Keats, as of many lovely and delicious things in this world, may spring merely from our sensuous desire for voluptuous images. If so, let us blame ourselves and not the poet.

But it is very different when a poet not only places lovely and voluptuous forms before us for our private interpretation, but assumes the garb of the teacher and teaches us a lie. This at least Keats does not do, and so far the negative is superior to the positive.

I think the time of life, and the mood, in which Keats's poems are both best appreciated and best used by us, is the period and mood of receptivity— when we drink in with rapture, without much discrimination or wish to discriminate, all that is lovely and sweet in visible nature, and in that other nature which poetry can create for us, and which Keats reproduced for us in, if possible, more than its natural

loveliness. In another sense than he deemed, "his name is writ in water

"On wood-embowered pools the moonlight's gleam

Oft ciphers with its silver rays his name."

His poems are, as it were, another nature, and in the truest sense, to use Shelley's exquisite words,-

"He is made one with Nature; there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own."

CHAPTER IX.

BYRON.

"Toi, dont le monde encore ignore le vrai nom,
Esprit mystérieux, mortel, ange ou démon."

Such are the three aspects under which at different times we are apt to regard Byron, as he appeals to our various sympathies or antipathies. And what is true of the man is true of his poems; for perhaps no poet is so inseparable from his writings-he lived them, and lives in them.

Therefore it is of less importance to relate his life and to discuss his character. There is also no lack of books and essays on the subject, of which I might mention Moore's life, and Trelawny's vigorous narrative, besides what Hobhouse (Lord Broughton), the Countess Guiccioli, Karl Elze, and others have to say, in praise or abuse.

So much indeed has been written and is read on the subject of Byron, that to most an abstract of his life, or an analysis of his personal character, would probably convey little new information. Besides which, I feel that his life and character, however in

teresting, are not subjects that tend to much practical good. The intensity of his genius seems to throw a halo round the man, and dazzles us, so that we cannot distinguish his real outlines.

I intend therefore, as far as may be possible, to avoid this Charybdis, and trust that I shall not in so doing run upon the Scylla of dry disquisition.

And, first of all, what were his own ideas on the subject of poetry? In this, as in all things, Byron's expressed opinions were of almost no value. No man ever meant so little what he said, or said so little that he meant. No man ever had such a bottomless pit of negation in his nature. To disbelieve, is (as Paley tells us) merely to believe in doubt instead of certainty. It is itself a kind of belief. But Byron's was doubt within doubt, one within the other interminably, like Ezekiel's wheels.

"When Bishop Berkeley * said 'there was no matter,'
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said.”

"There's no such thing as certainty, that's plain;

So little do we know what we're about in

This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting.”

And again—

*

*

"O Doubt; if thou be'st Doubt, for which some take thee, But which I doubt extremely."

Such was Byron's opinion about certainty, if indeed

* Bishop Berkeley wrote the "Minute Philosopher." He denied the objective existence of the material world.

it can be called an opinion. It is not badly summed up by the author of the parody on Byron in the "Rejected Addresses: "

"Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,

And nought is everything, and everything is nought."

He certainly laid very little importance himself on these opinions of his-these doubts within doubts— and I think he was right. We learn but little from them, which we can apply as a test to his poems. But it will be well to glance at them. It seems to me that Byron's expressed opinions—like almost all his conduct-were the result of a spirit of opposition, not unmixed with motives of pride and a petty ambition. It was a sense of his inferiority, of the hopelessness of ever rivalling such a poet, that made him speak slightingly of Shakespeare. Milton and Shakespeare, according to him, are but transitory glories; they have risen, and they will set in oblivion. "If you like you may call Shakespeare and Milton pyramids,” he says, "but I prefer a temple of Theseus or a Parthenon to a mountain of burnt bricks." What then was this Parthenon? It was Pope's poetry. All his contemporaries, and all the great poets of the Renaissance, and he himself in so far as against his own theory he allowed himself to be influenced by them, were, in language that he borrowed from Voltaire, nothing but barbarians. In this opinion I can see nothing but a spirit of contradiction and a desire to attract notice. Had he really believed in it he would